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alevelrs · 6 months ago

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The Ontological Argument

The ontological argument claims that God’s existence can be demonstrated simply through reasoning. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that explores the whole concept of existence. It is an a priori argument, in that it works from first principles, pure conceptual truth and definition in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of God. It is also deductive, using logic rather than empirical evidence.

According to the ontological argument, everything (with the exception of God) exists in a contingent way; it depends upon other factors. Human beings are contingent beings because they would not exist if their parents didn’t exist before them – absolutely everything else exists contingently too. However, God is not a ‘thing’; He has not come about because of anything; there was no time when God didn’t exist. Some, such as Paul Tillich, argue ‘exists’ isn’t the right word to use of God at all.

Anselm and the ontological argument

Anselm starts by defining God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’. God is understood to be the highest sum of all perfections, where absolutely nothing could ever surpass God in any way. He argued that of we have an idea of a God who is perfect in every way, where nothing could possibly be greater, then this God must exist in reality. This is because a God who just exists in our heads – something we imagined to be great but doesn’t actually exist – would be inferior to a real God, and because God cannot be inferior to anything, He must exist.

Analogies can be used to understand this point: what would be greater: a huge heap of cash that exists in your imagination, or the same heap of cash in real life? In Anselm’s understanding of God, no one could seriously argue that a non-existent God would surpass an existent God in greatness.

So, his first form of the ontological argument follows this line of argument:

God is that than which nothing greater can be thought.

A real, existent being would be greater than an imaginary, illusionary being.

Therefore, the concept of God is surpassed by an actual, existent God.

In the second form of his argument, very similar to the first, he argued that it was impossible for God not to exist, because contingent beings are inferior to beings with a necessary existence:

God is that than which nothing greater can be thought.

Because God is unsurpassable in every way. God must have necessary existence.

Therefore God exists – necessarily.

God must exist because a necessary being cannot fail to exist. According to Anselm, necessary existence is part of the definition of God – you cannot talk about a God who does not exist, because He would not be God.

Analytic and synthetic propositions

The ontological argument can be understood by drawing a distinction between two kinds of propositions.

An analytic proposition is true by definition, e.g. ‘bachelors are unmarried men’. This proposition doesn’t need to be tested, because it can be arrived at by deduction – the concept of being a bachelor involves the concept of being unmarried, and a man. Anselm, in his ontological argument, claims that the statement ‘God exists’ is analytic – the concept of God involves the concept of existence, and without existence, the concept of God wouldn’t exist.

A synthetic proposition adds something to our understanding, beyond the definition – we need more than deduction to know if it is true or not: experience. ‘The corner shop sells newspapers’ is a synthetic proposition, because the concept of corner shops doesn’t include the concept of selling newspapers – you would have to go and check to know the truth of the proposition.

Anselm argued that ‘God exists’ is an analytic a priori statement, making reference to Psalm 53:1: “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God” They are corrupt and their ways are vile.” He found it difficult to understand how anyone could have the concept of God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’ without also realising that God must exist.

Gaunilo’s Criticisms of Anselm

Gaunilo was a Christian, but he thought Anselm’s argument was not logical. He claimed that these logical flaws would be made obvious if we replaced the idea of God in his argument with an island. We could imagine the most excellent Lost Island, and then, using Anselm’s logic, go on to say that for such an island to exist in our minds means that this is inferior to the same island existing in reality. It is truly the most excellent, it cannot have the inferiority that comes from it being a concept only, it must exist in reality. But clearly, there is no such island in reality, we cannot bring something into reality just by defining it as a superlative.

Anselm replied to this argument by saying that although Gaunilo was right in the case of an island, the same objection did not work when the ontological argument was used of God, because an island has a contingent existence whereas God has a necessary existence. The argument only works with God because of the uniqueness of God and how He exists.

Aquinas’s criticisms of Anselm

Thomas Aquinas argued that the existence of God could be demonstrated through a posteriori arguments, but not through a priori reasoning alone. One of his points was that God’s existence cannot be self-evident. He said that if we take a statement such as ‘Truth does not exist’, it in nonsensical because no one can accept the truth of ‘truth does not exist’ unless truth actually does exist. It is impossible to have a mental concept of the non-existence of truth because it is a contradiction in terms. However, it is not impossible to have a mental concept of the non-existence of God, because people quite clearly imagine it. If we can imagine a state of godlessness, then it cannot be a contradiction in terms, despite Anselm’s claims.

Aquinas also acknowledged that God will always remain unknowable to the finite human mind, questioning whether everyone would accept Anselm’s definition of God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’. Aquinas argued that we do not all share an understanding of what God is, and rejects the premise of Anselm’s argument. He was aware of the limitations of the human mind to comprehend the nature of God and emphasised that, at least until after death, we have to accept that God is mysterious and beyond human comprehension.

Descartes’s view of the ontological argument

Descartes believed that there are some concepts that are innate and universally shared by all of humanity, such as equality, cause, shape and number, as well as an understanding of what God is. We understand God to be the supremely perfect being, with every perfection as his attributes, ‘perfection’ meaning the traditional attributes of God such as omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence.

He used the analogies of a mountain and of a triangle to explain. He claimed that existence is part of the essence of God, just as three angles adding up to 180 degrees are part of the essence of a triangle, and a valley is part of the essence of a mountain. He recognised that these analogies have their limitations, as although we may not be able to think of a mountain without a valley, the mountain-and-valley combination in our imaginations doesn’t necessarily exist in real life. However, for God it is different because his nature involves perfections rather than angles or valleys, and for Descartes, existence is a perfection.

Because God has all the perfections, and existence is a perfection, God therefore exists. And because God is perfect, he must be unchanging, so he must always have existed and will always continue to exist for eternity.

Kant’s critique of ontological arguments

Kant’s major criticism of Descartes’s argument was ‘existence is not a predicate’ – in other words, existence is not a characteristic or attribute of something. Predicates describe what that thing is like – tall, green, round etc, but ‘existence’, Kant argued, is not the same as a predicate as it doesn’t tell us anything about the object that would help us to identify it in any way. When we say something ‘exists’, we are not saying that it has a certain characteristic, but rather that this concept, with all its characteristics has been ‘actualised’ or ‘exemplified’. His point is that when we are thinking of God, whether through Descartes or Anselm’s arguments, we are thinking of a concept, and whether that concept is actualised in the real world is an issue that cannot be resolved by simply adding ‘existence’ to the different predicates. We can predicate of a triangle that it has three sides, and that its angles add up to 180 degrees, but we would have to investigate further to find out whether the triangle we are picturing in our minds has been actualised.

He used the example of a hundred Prussian dollars to illustrate how existence is not a predicate. Adding ‘exists’ to the idea of God, as a predicate, doesn’t add anything new to what we understand by God, but is just a comment on whether he exists. In the same way, an imaginary $100 is not ‘added to’ if we substitute it for a real $100 – we are talking about the same amount of money either way.

Some, such as Norman Malcolm may argue against this by saying that existence is usually not a characteristic that helps us distinguish between one thing and another and so usually is not a predicate, but necessary existence is a characteristic that does draw a distinction between God and everything else, just like God’s other characteristics of omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience. However, this makes the argument circular: we have to accept that God exists necessarily to come to the conclusion that God exists necessarily.

Bertrand Russell on the ontological argument

He criticised it by asking us to consider the statement ‘the present King of France is bald’. This statement is not true, but that doesn’t mean that therefore the statement ‘the present King of France is not bald’ is true, because there is no present King of France. Our use of words and the way we apply predicates, such as bald and not bald, is not enough to demonstrate that something exists, and when we apply predicates to something whose existence is a matter of uncertainty, we cannot expect the normal rules of linguistic logic to apply.

Discussion points

A priori arguments can be persuasive as they lead us to a certain truth, whilst a posteriori arguments can only lead to probabilities.

He ontological argument can seem like an intellectual puzzle made for elite, educated people meaning it is quite inaccessible. People often want to see evidence for themselves using their own senses, rather than rely on the conceptual reasoning of philosophers.

The ontological argument is not convincing enough to make someone who doesn’t believe in God change their mind, BUT Anselm did not set out to convert non-believers, he was simply helping those who already held a belief to gain a deeper understanding of His uniqueness and greatness. Religious belief is much more than just an intellectual acceptance of certain assertions, but involves, emotions, intuitions and commitment. It does not fall simply on the strength of a logical argument.

Faith in God seems to demand an element of uncertainty, and a willingness to take risks. God may need to remain partially hidden from the world to maintain epistemic distance, meaning the world should remain ‘religiously ambiguous’ so people have a choice. Only with this epistemic distance is it possible for humans to have a genuinely free will to exercise faith – if God’s existence were undeniable, faith would mean nothing.

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ewingstan · 2 years ago

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So one of the more popular attempted proofs of God’s existence was formulated by St. Anselm in 1078. The argument goes that we all are able have a concept of God, i.e. the concept of a greatest possible being. According to Anselm, it would be a contradiction to conceive of a being with more positive attributes than God, as God is “the being that which no greater can exist” (Barnes, 1972, quoted. from Stanford Encyclopedia entry “Ontological Arguments”).

Now, existence is obviously an inherently positive attribute, such that a being that exists is greater than a being identical in every way except for being nonexistent. So to go back to our concept of God: if God didn’t exist, then we would have a contradiction, as we could imagine a God that did exist and was therefor greater. But God is the most perfect being, so if we could imagine a being more perfect than our concept of God, than our concept of God is not truly of God at all. Therefore, because we can conceive of God/the greatest possible being, and because existence increases greatness,

As we can all see, there are absolutely no problems with this argument. Theologically useful as this was in the eleventh, in the modern day it has a much more useful purpose: we can use the same proof to show that Amy Dallon canonically did nothing wrong.

It is well established that worm fans have professed an ability to imagine the greatest possible Amy. While these interpretations of Amy tend to differ from each other, the sheer number of fans claiming this means that someone must truly be able to conceptualize the greatest possible Amy. It is of course obvious that an Amy that was canonical to the text of worm would be greater, all things being equal, to an identical Amy that was non-canonical. Given that the perfect Amy would be 1) without sin and 2) canonical to the text, our ability to imagine the greatest possible Amy necessitates that Amy Dallon canonically did nothing wrong. Thanks Anselm!

#sorry for hiding my shitpost behind a difficult-to-get-through logical proof #that people were clowning on from the eleventh century onwards #worm #wildbow #parahumans #amy dallon #leo says #leo reads worm #ontological shitposts

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hacvek · 1 year ago

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@wo-chien-fan said: yeah! i do think there are things you must conceive of as existing that don't exist. 'a real unicorn', for example. like the only reason you must imagine god existing is you've taken two ideas, a god that exists and a god that doesn't, and ruled out the latter as god via definition. you can do a similar procedure on other ideas, so 'a real unicorn' is by definition a unicorn that is real, and while there is no object that answers to that definition in real life, there is one in my conception.

great you've fallen into my trap I was actually just thinking about this

Say unicorn1 is definitionally a unicorn that exists, then anything that is a unicorn1 must exist (and be a unicorn). If there is no such existent being outside of my mind, that's fine; just because I can conceive of it doesn't mean there's anything in reality it refers to. I can also conceive of a unicorn2, definitionally a unicorn that does not exist. Nothing about the definition of "unicorn" (say, "a horned horse") necessitates there must be a corresponding referent. When I think of a unicorn, there is nothing a priori that tells me whether it is a unicorn1 or a unicorn2.

We can derive the same triad for the thing than which nothing greater can be conceived (henceforth God). So is there anything a priori that tells me when I conceive of God whether it is God1 (God that exists) or God2 (God that doesn't exist)? According to Anselm, yes, God2 is a contradiction in terms (in the argument you're familiar with), while God1 is coherent. So the God we conceive of must be God1, and thereby the definition that does not include a clause as to the existence of a referent must be collapsed to the definition which does. The whole point of the ontological argument is that the existence of God follows from the concept of God. That's true neither for unicorns nor real unicorns. Does this make sense?

#personal

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tombuckreviews · 10 months ago

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The Judo Argument book review

Debates about whether God exists have raged for ages and probably always will. Such arguments typically play out in philosophy and theology. However, some reason from a scientific perspective - employing findings about the natural world to argue for divine origins. These "judo arguments” attempt to beat science at its own game, citing laws and evidence to make a faith-based case. While novel, they universally come up short when scrutinized scientifically.

A common argument notes that complex life could not have evolved randomly, as entropy dictates decay toward disorder. Thus, intentional intelligent design must be involved. However, Earth isn’t a closed system – the Sun provides ample energy for local organizing processes to emerge so long as net universal entropy increases. Another argues that amino acids forming the first proteins randomly would be astronomically unlikely. However, while a precise protein repeating by chance is unlikely, some self-replicating molecule arising eventually becomes probable - and selection could amplify it.

The Ontological Argument: Defining God Into Being One of the earliest scientific arguments for God's existence is the "ontological argument" put forward by St. Anselm in 1078. His reasoning goes that the very concept of a perfect being implies its existence since non-existence would be an imperfection. This argument attempts to define God into existence through logic, without the need for evidence. While inventive for its time, modern philosophers largely reject it as unsupported semantic trickery. As sci-fi author Asimov notes with humor in his essay titled “The Judo Argument,” conceiving even a “perfect gas” does not necessitate its physical existence in reality.

Thermodynamics and the Improbability of Order A more common judo argument invokes the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy or disorder universally tends to increase in closed systems. The case goes that evolution's drive towards greater order and complexity over billions of years appears to violate this. Thus, intentional intelligent design must be involved to circumvent random decay. However, Asimov adeptly counters that Earth isn’t a closed system – the Sun provides ample incoming energy to facilitate local organizing processes so long as net entropy increases in the larger solar system. Just as a refrigerator can stay cold inside by releasing more heat to its surroundings, life can self-organize additional order so long as there is an external energy gradient to exploit.

Probability Calculations and the Origins of Life In his 1947 book "Human Destiny," French biophysicist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy calculates the absurdly low probability that the amino acid chains forming the first proteins could have been linked by pure chance random interactions within the lifetime of Earth. He presents this tiny probability as persuasive evidence for intentional divine design seeding life. Asimov admits the odds of randomly hitting on an exact known protein are infinitesimal. However, his rebuttal shows that while likely amino acid combinations are still insufficient to spark replication, some variability remains probable. Thus, once any self-copying molecule like RNA eventually forms by chance, mutation, and selection can take over to bridge the gap from chemistry to evolutionary biology. This incremental bootstrapping pathway is now supported by decades of origin of life experiments, rather than necessitating one impossibly unlikely jackpot molecule.

Order Emerging Spontaneously from Chaos While Asimov stops short of any definitive statements on God’s existence either way, his systematic take-downs of such arguments rooted in shaky logic demonstrate the awesome power of emergent order possible from chaotic physical and chemical laws alone. Contrary to Creationist doctrine, complexity does not imply an intelligent Creator. In Asimov’s model grounded by evidence, life proliferates not despite, but precisely because of, the organizational trends intrinsic to dynamic non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems with sufficient energy flows. Those seeking an honest assessment of how far science can go in engaging with faith will find “The Judo Argument” a thought-provoking and enlightening read. More broadly, it highlights the wonder, chance, and self-organization built into nature that allowed humankind to eventually emerge and ponder such eternal questions - no deities required.

The March of Science Towards Natural Explanations Over the centuries, phenomena once cited definitively as proof of divine influence - from lightning to human origins to disease treatment - have consistently yielded to natural scientific explanations rather than legitimizing supernatural ones. While gaps remain in our knowledge, the march towards material and empirical causes continues unabated. Those hoping science will reach its limits and endorse intentional explanations are invariably disappointed. Today mysteries like consciousness, dark matter, and the spark of life draw those seeking transcendence for what science has yet to explain. But theories are already emerging of these grounded in complex feedback loops, exotic particles, and energetic chemistry alone, without any need for external souls, creators, or vital energies.

Can Science and Religion Ever Be Reconciled? While judo arguments fail to leverage science to demonstrate the intent behind life’s emergence, the impasse between scientific and spiritual worldviews persists. They operate in separate spheres concerning very different kinds of questions - the mechanical how versus the numinous why. Asimov gives reason for optimism by engaging deeply with the science cited rather than dismissing it outright, respecting religious conviction even while disputing faulty logic. In that spirit of mutual respect for evidence and belief, the relationship between science and philosophy might finally leave behind centuries of tension. Just as interdisciplinary research unifies micro and macro fields, more grace-filled profound dialogues between leading thinkers pursuing different facets of truth may continue to relieve friction and enlighten humankind.

The Judo Argument: Wrestling with Science and Faith In his thought-provoking book "The Judo Argument," author Shoaib Rahman examines several longstanding attempts to use science to definitively prove the existence of God. He dubbed these "judo arguments" - when believers try to flip science's logic against itself to argue for supernatural explanations from a rational perspective.

Order Emerging from Chaos

Many such arguments hinge on the claim that complex structures like the human eye could not have evolved randomly or that the spark of life itself beating the odds is too improbable without guidance. However, as Rahman points out, the second law of thermodynamics only probabilistically favors increased entropy rather than strictly mandating it. With ample external energy sources like the Sun, locally reversing entropy through organizing processes that ultimately enable life is not unlikely over billions of years.

Probability Statistics Misapplied

In perhaps the book's most compelling chapter, Rahman unpacks the fallacies in prominent creationist probability calculations. While authorities cite the infinitesimal chances of proteins or DNA chains forming exactly as they exist today spontaneously, he notes this is the wrong comparison. The first self-replicating molecules would likely be far simpler, adapting later by evolutionary processes. Moreover, while any given outcome is very unlikely, some outcome proving viable is still probable - especially with chemical building blocks already extant.

When Statistics Fail Philosophy

Yet at its heart, Rahmansympathetically explains these arguments stem from cognitive gaps left unsatisfied by reductionist science. Statistical improbabilities argued as necessitating guidance disguise deeper existential grappling. But just as dividing accident from intent may provide comfort, 'God' often inserts higher questions rather than answers. Neither statistics nor semantics can capture the whole of reality. By revealing judo arguments' overreliance on these tools, Rahman shows how they fail philosophy before even reaching faulty science.

A Reasonable Path Forward

While cataloging gaps in past efforts, Rahman notably stops short of conclusively disproving God, remaining open to new evidence. He simply shows the folly of attempting proof, either way, advocating humility. Within those wise constraints, his dismantling of shaky logic sympathetic to the motivations provides a blueprint for more constructive dialogues between science and faith. For non-believers, it unpacks assumptions reflecting existential angst. For believers, it respects faith's convictions while avoiding easily falsifiable scientific extrapolations in tension with theology's teachings.

By showcasing judo arguments' inadequacies with both evidence and meaning, Rahman's "The Judo Argument" charts a reasonable path forward for reconciling the compatibility questions haunting science and religion’s conflicted past. Perhaps their interplay can yet offer mutual illumination of both immanent and transcendent mysteries. But crudely wielding each against the other proves nothing, clarifies little, misses the point entirely, and impoverishes all parties. This book provides helpful guideposts to move that stalled conversation into more enlightened territory.

#books #books & libraries #new books #book recommendations #book review

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pieratt · 1 year ago

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A few more: The term for the field that attempts to provide rational arguments for the existence of God is known as "Natural Theology". It's an aspect of philosophical theology that seeks to argue for theism using reason and ordinary experiences of nature and human beings.

Moral Argument: This argument asserts that there must be a moral lawgiver (God) because there are moral laws, or an objective sense of right and wrong. Without a transcendent, objective standard, morality would be subjective and non-binding.

Ontological Argument: This is a category of philosophical arguments which argue for the existence of God based on the nature of being and existence itself. The most famous ontological argument was proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, who argued that because God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," He must exist in reality, not just in the understanding.

Transcendental Argument: These arguments assert that all our abilities to think and reason require the existence of God. One version of this argument, often associated with the Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til, claims that in order to make sense of any aspect of human experience, we must presuppose a God who is necessary, personal, and moral.

Argument from Consciousness: This argument asserts that human consciousness cannot be explained by physical processes alone, and thus, a supernatural being (i.e., God) must have had a role in its existence.

Argument from Miracles: This argument posits that events that defy natural explanation (miracles) testify to the existence of a supernatural being.

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bookofdan · 2 years ago

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sabakos · 4 months ago

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history of philosophy punishment game idea: loser has to rehabilitate Anselm's Ontological argument for the existence of God

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isaiahbie · 11 months ago

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The Modal Ontological Argument

In order to understand this argument, you need to understand what philosophers mean by “possible worlds.” A possible world is just a way the world might have been. It is a description of a possible reality. So a possible world is not a planet or a universe or any kind of concrete object, it is a world-description. The “actual world” is the description that is true. Other possible worlds are descriptions that are not in fact true but which might have been true. To say that something exists in some possible world is to say that there is some consistent description of reality which includes that entity. To say that something exists in every possible world means that no matter which description is true, that entity will be included in the description. For example, unicorns do not in fact exist, but there are some possible worlds in which unicorns exist. On the other hand, many mathematicians think that numbers exist in every possible world.

Now with that in mind, consider the ontological argument, which was discovered in the year 1011 by the monk Anselm of Canterbury. God, Anselm observes, is by definition the greatest being conceivable. If you could conceive of anything greater than God, then that would be God. Thus, God is the greatest conceivable being—a maximally great being. So what would such a being be like? He would be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, and He would exist in every logically possible world. A being which lacked any of those properties would not be maximally great: we could conceive of something greater—a being which did have all these properties.

But this implies that if God’s existence is even possible, then God must exist. For if a maximally great being exists in any possible world, He exists in all of them. That’s part of what it means to be maximally great—to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good in every logically possible world. So if God’s existence is even possible, then He exists in every logically possible world—and therefore in the actual world.

We can summarize this argument as follows:

It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.

If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.

Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

Therefore, God exists.

It might surprise you to learn that steps 2-7 of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God’s existence is even possible, then He must exist.

So the question is, is God’s existence possible? Well, what do you think? The atheist has to maintain that it’s impossible that God exists. That is, he has to maintain that the concept of God is logically incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor or a round square. The problem is that the concept of God just doesn’t appear to be incoherent in that way. The idea of a being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good in every possible world seems perfectly coherent. And arguments for thinking otherwise, warns atheist Richard Carrier, are “not valid, since any definition of god (or his properties) that is illogical can just be revised to be logical. So in effect, Arguments from Incoherence aren’t really arguments for atheism, but for the reform of theology.”¹ Moreover, there are other arguments for God’s existence which at least suggest that it’s possible that God exists. So I’ll just leave it with you. Do you think, as I do, that it’s at least possible that God exists? If so, then it follows logically that He does exist.

Notes:

¹ Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness Without God, 2005.

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rw7771 · 1 year ago

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Arguments for the existence of God

a philosophy lesson

The Ontological Argument:

The Ontological Argument, initially proposed by St. Anselm and Avicenna in the 11th Century, attempts to prove the existence of God through a priori abstract reasoning alone. It argues that part of what we mean when we speak of “God” is “perfect being”, or one of whom nothing greater can be conceived, and that is essentially what the word “God” means. A God that exists, of course, is better than a God that doesn’t, so to speak of God as a perfect being is therefore necessary to imply that he exists. So God’s existence is implied by the very concept of God, and when we speak of “God” we cannot but speak of a being that exists. By this argument, to say that God does not exist is a contradiction in terms.

The argument is certainly ingenious, but has the appearance of a linguistic trick. The same ontological argument could be used to prove the existence of any perfect thing at all (for example, Anselm's contemporary, the monk Gaunilo, used it to show that a perfect island must exist). Immanuel Kant argued against the ontological argument on the grounds that existence is not a property of objects but a property of concepts, and that, whatever ideas may participate in a given concept, it is a further question whether that concept is instantiated.

The Cosmological Argument:

The Cosmological Argument is the argument that the existence of the world or universe implies the existence of a being that brought it into existence (and keeps it in existence). In essence, the argument is that everything that moves is moved by something else; an infinite regress (that is, going back through a chain of movers forever) is impossible; and therefore there must exist a first mover (i.e. God). It comes in two forms, modal (having to do with possibility), and temporal (having to do with time):

The Modal Cosmological Argument:

This argument, also known as the Argument from Contingency, suggests that because the universe might not have existed (i.e. it is contingent, as opposed to necessary), we then need some explanation of why it does exist. Wherever there are two possibilities, something must determine which of those possibilities is realized. Therefore, as the universe is contingent, there must be some reason for its existence, i.e. it must have a cause. In fact, the only kind of being whose existence requires no explanation is a necessary being, a being that could not have failed to exist. The ultimate cause of everything must therefore be a necessary being, such as God.

Critics of the argument from contingency have sometimes questioned whether the universe is in fact contingent, and why God should be considered a necessary being (simply asking "Does God have a cause of his existence?” raises as many problems as the cosmological argument solves). Also, even if God is thought not to have, or not to need, a cause of his existence, then his existence would be a counter-example to the initial premise that everything that exists has a cause of its existence).

The Temporal Cosmological Argument:

This argument, also known as the Kalam Argument for the medieval Muslim school of philosophy of al-Kindi (801 - 873) and al-Ghazali (1058 - 1111) which first proposed it, argues that all indications are that there is a point in time at which the universe began to exist, (a universe stretching back in time into infinity being both philosophically and scientifically problematic), and that this beginning must either have been caused or uncaused. The idea of an uncaused event is absurd, because nothing comes from nothing. The universe must therefore have been brought into existence by something outside it, which can be called "God".

The argument rests on the somewhat controversial claim that the universe has a beginning in time, but also does not explain why there could not be more than one first cause/mover, or why the chain could not lead back to several ultimate causes, each somehow outside the universe (potentially leading to several different Gods).

The Teleological Argument:

The Teleological Argument (also known as the Argument from Design or Intelligent Design) suggests that the order in the world implies a being that created it with a specific purpose (the creation of life) in mind. The universe is an astoundingly complex but highly ordered system, and the world is fine-tuned to provide exactly the right conditions for the development and sustenance of life. To say that the universe is so ordered by chance is therefore unsatisfactory as an explanation of the appearance of design around us. St Thomas Aquinas was the most famous subscriber to this argument, but the most cited statement of the argument is that of William Paley (1743 - 1805), who likened the universe to a watch, with many ordered parts working in harmony to further some purpose.

Evolutionary theory, however, can explain the appearance of biological design, even if not the laws of nature. David Hume counter-argued that we know that man-made structures were designed because we have seen them being built, but how can we be sure that the analogy holds? He also pointed out that certain events in the world (e.g. natural disasters) suggest that God didn't do a very good job of designing the universe, which belies the concept of a perfect being. Others, who reject the argument in its entirety, dispute whether the order and complexity in the universe does in fact constitute design. The mere fact that it something is enormously improbable does not by itself give us reason to conclude that it occurred by design. Also, the idea that our universe is but one material universe in a "multiverse" in which all possible material universes are ultimately realized, suggests that there is nothing particularly suspicious about the fact that at least one of them is a fine-tuned universe.

The Moral Argument:

The Moral Argument argues that the existence or nature of morality implies the existence of God. Three forms of moral argument are distinguished, formal, perfectionist and Kantian:

The Formal Moral Argument:

This argument suggests that the form of morality implies that it has a divine origin. If morality consists of an ultimately authoritative set of commands, where can these commands have come from but a commander that has ultimate authority (namely God)?

It begs the question, however, as to whether morality is in fact ultimately authoritative, and whether morals actually exist or have meaning independently of us or whether there are alternative explanations for the existence of morals.

The Perfectionist Moral Argument:

This argument suggests that morality requires perfection of us, but we are not in fact perfect. However, although we cannot achieve moral perfection by our own strength, we can do so with God’s help, which implies the existence of God. The gap between our moral duties and what we are capable of doing therefore implies the existence of a God, as the only way to resolve this paradox.

Immanuel Kant, however, argues that “ought” implies “can”, so that if we have an obligation to do a thing then it logically follows that we are able to do it, and morality cannot require of us more than we are able to give. Or it can also be argued that morality is just a guide and does not actually require perfection of us, and that it is in fact acceptable to fall short of the moral standard.

The Kantian Moral Argument:

This argument, proposed by Immanuel Kant, presupposes that moral behavior is rational and that we should have good reason to behave morally. Looking around the world, though, we see that in many cases immoral behavior does profit more than moral behavior, and that life is not fair. Kant therefore argued that moral behavior will only be rational is there is more than just this life, if justice is administered in the next life.

However, this does not fully answer why should it have to be God in particular that brings about the higher good, nor why something should necessarily have to be, just because we decide it both ought and can.

The Religious Experience Argument:

The Religious Experience Argument posits that one can only perceive that which exists, and so God must exist because there are those that have experienced him. The fact that there are many people who testify to having had such experiences constitutes at least indirect evidence of God’s existence, even to those who have not had such experiences themselves.

Some, though, argue that religious experiences involve imagination rather than perception, and there is always the possibility of fabricating artificial experiences of God, or that the experiences are not religious but merely interpreted that way by religious people. Also, adherents of all religions (mutually inconsistent and conflicting) claim to have had experiences that validate those religions, and if not all of these appeals are valid then none can be. In addition, why do we not all have religious experiences? Yet another counter-argument is the skeptical idea that all experiences (including religious experiences) are subjective, and no matter how one person perceives the world to be, there are any number of ways that it could be. Barely tangible religious experiences are by their nature even more uncertain than our familiar and lucid experiences of the external world, which are themselves unreliable.

The Miracles Argument:

The Argument from Miracles argues that the occurrence of miracles (which involve the suspension of the natural operation of the universe as some supernatural event occurs), presupposes the existence of some supernatural being. If the Bible is to be believed, then, such miracles demonstrate both the existence of God and the truth of Christianity.

However, the essential implicit assumption in this argument is "if the Bible is to be believed", which is by no means a given. In addition, according to David Hume, no matter how strong the evidence for a specific miracle may be, it will always be more rational to reject the miracle than to believe in it (given that there are two factors to assess in deciding whether to believe any given piece of testimony: the reliability of the witness, and the probability of that to which they testify).

Pascal’s Wager:

Blaise Pascal argued for belief in God based not on an appeal to evidence that God exists, but rather that it is in our interests to believe in God and it is therefore rational for us to do so: If we believe in God, then if he exists we will receive an infinite reward in heaven, while if he does not then we have lost little or nothing. Conversely, if we do not believe in God, then if he exists we will receive an infinite punishment in hell, while if he does not then we will have gained little or nothing. "Either receiving an infinite reward in heaven or losing little or nothing" is clearly preferable to "either receiving an infinite punishment in hell or gaining little or nothing", so it is rational to believe in God, even if there is no evidence that he exists.

However, this only works if the only possible criterion for entrance into heaven is belief in the Christian God and the only possible criterion for entrance into hell is disbelief in the Christian God. Also, if one argues that the probability that God exists (and therefore of either receiving an infinite reward in heaven or of receiving an infinite punishment in hell) is so small that these possible outcomes of belief or disbelief can be discounted, then Atheism is the rational course of action as it is better to gain little or nothing than it is to lose little or nothing. Thirdly, Pascal’s Wager asks us to believe without reason, whereas in practice one requires evidence for the truth of a belief.

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ramblingsofamuskrat · 1 year ago

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Critically compare Plato’s form of the good with Aristotle’s prime mover. ‘Aristotelian teleology is outdated’ – Discuss. Critically compare Plato’s hierarchy of the forms with Aristotle’s four causes.

‘Discussion of the mind-body distinction is a category error’ – Critically assess this view.Is the concept of the soul best understood metaphorically or as a reality?Assess the philosophical language of soul, mind and body in Plato and Aristotle’s work.‘The soul is the way the body behaves and lives’ – Discuss.Analyse the metaphysics of consciousness.

Is a posteriori a more successful form of argument than a priori?Is God’s existence better proven by a priori or a posteriori argument?‘A priori argument is stronger than a posteriori’ – Discuss.Assess Aquinas’ 5th way“The teleological argument fails due to the challenge of evolution” – Discuss.Does evolution disprove the teleological argument?

Is a posteriori a more successful form of argument than a priori? ‘A priori argument is stronger than a posteriori’ – Discuss. Assess Gaunilo’s criticisms of the ontological argument. Assess Kant’s criticisms of the ontological argument

Are corporate religious experiences more reliable than individual experiences? How successful are the views and main conclusions of William James? Does the influence religious experiences have show they have a supernatural source? ‘Conversion experiences are more reliable than mystical experiences’ – How far do you agree?

Is the logical or evidential problem of evil the greater challenge to belief?Is it easier to show that God’s existence lacks evidence than that it is logically impossible?‘Augustine solves the logical problem of evil’ – DiscussDoes Augustine’s theodicy succeed against the evidential problem of evil?‘Hick cannot solve the evidential problem of evil’ – How far do you agree?How successfully can the evidental problem of evil be addressed through the explanation of soul-making?

Assess Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach. Does Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach adequately explain divine action in time? Evaluate Boethius’ view of divine action and time. Critically compare Anselm with Swinburne on God’s relationship with time. “It is not necessary to resolve the apparent conflicts between divine attributes” – Discuss.

Does Aquinas’ analogical approach support effective expression of language about God? Is symbolic religious language comprehensible?

Assess Mitchell’s contribution to the falsification symposiumIs religious language a form of life?To what extent is Aquinas’ analogical view of religious language valuable in the philosophy of religion.Should non-cognitive approaches influence interpretation of religious texts?

Where are you pulling these ideas from?!?! Genuinely...

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alevelrs · 2 days ago

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The Idea of Divine Power

The omnipotence paradox is when the whole notion of total power seems to be self-contradictory. For example: Can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? On one hand, omnipotence involves being able to do absolutely anything. On the other hand, there are some actions that seem impossible for an omnipotent being to do, such as ‘fail at a task’ or ‘be defeated by another being’. If omnipotence itself is impossible, then there cannot be any omnipotent beings.

It is also questioned whether omnipotence can be compatible with other characteristics traditionally ascribed to the Christian God, such as omnibenevolence – it would be illogical for God to be able to do evil (because He’s all powerful) and unable to do evil (because he is all loving). Also, omniscience – how could God add to his knowledge (because he has the power to do anything) and unable to add to his knowledge (because he already knows everything).

Passages in the Bible that support his omnipotence:

“And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.”

“He who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land – the Lord is his name”.

“God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie”.

“God cannot fail”.

“With God all things are possible”.

Christian theologians take the view that if God did not have supreme power, he would not be able to do the things necessary for human salvation. For example, to create and carry out his plans for the universe; to resurrect people from death; to give eternal life in heaven. Anselm and Descartes developed on this when they formed the ontological argument: God is ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’, so if God were anything less than omnipotent, we would be able to conceive of a greater, more powerful being; so, God, by definition, must be omnipotent.

Descartes

Descartes argued that God can do absolutely anything, even that which is logically impossible, such as making a square circle or making 2 + 2 = 5, because God is the supreme perfection and so cannot have any limitations. He is the source of logic and has the power to suspend it or replace it whenever he wants to, so the laws of mathematics only exist because God created them that way, and he has the ability to override them. He believed any other understandings of omnipotence put restrains on the greatness of God and dishonoured it. God can see how to be contradictory because he is omnipotent.

However, most Christian scholars argue that this understanding of omnipotence is mistaken – logical contradictions are not ‘things’. It is not lack of power that prevents God from creating a square circle, but the fact that a square circle is nonsense.

His view turns God into an unpredictable tyrant who might do anything, so we cannot rely on him. If he has power to do anything, he could turn against us or do evil at any time, or his moral rules might change at any minute, so it makes it impossible for people to have a relationship with God or trust him for their salvation. It creates difficulty for theodicies which suggest that God could not act in any other way he does without depriving us of our free will. Suffering is a price that has to be paid in order to make free choices, but if Descartes is correct and God is capable of absolutely anything such as suspending the laws of logic even to prevent evil, it prevents God from being perfectly loving.

Aquinas

Aquinas argues that God is completely omnipotent in the sense of being in charge of the whole world, creating it and keeping it in existence. Aquinas said that God is omnipotent because: ‘he can do everything that is absolutely possible’, qualified by saying that ‘everything that does not imply a contradiction is among those possibilities in respect of which God is called omnipotent’. So he can do anything logically possible, but of it is not logically possible that it cannot be done by God, because something like a square circle cannot be made at all. Therefore, God cannot do anything that is inconsistent with his nature because that would imply a contradiction – he has no body, so he cannot swim or die and he is perfectly good, so he cannot deceive or do any other form of evil.

Swinburne

Swinburne takes Aquinas’s view in saying that God’s omnipotence means he can do anything, but this has to be understood properly. He can do and create all ‘things’ but self-contradictory definitions do not refer to ‘things’. A square circle is not a ‘thing’, a stone too heavy for God to lift is not a ‘thing’, so God couldn’t make them. This is not a challenge to his omnipotence.

Vardy

James Vardy suggests that God’s omnipotence is much more limited than previous Christians have suggested – he is not in control of the whole of history, or able to move things around like pieces on a chessboard, and it is wrong to suggest that everything happens because of the will of God. Instead, he created the universe in such a way that his ability to act is necessarily limited, because if not everything would not be able to exist in the way it does. However, this limitation is self-imposed – nothing limits his power except when he chooses.

John Macquarrie

Macquarrie emphasises that any limitations on God’s omnipotence are self-imposed. He is not constrained by logic, nor the physical world, nor by the actions of human beings, but is constrained in his omnipotence merely because he chooses to limit his own power out of love for humanity.

This idea of God’s self-limitation has been explored particularly in the context of Christology to answer questions based around how Jesus could be the Son of God if he didn’t always showcase God’s attributes. Theologians have developed a doctrine known as ‘kenosis’, meaning self-emptying’, in which Jesus emptied himself of some of his divine attributes before coming to Earth to make his encounter with humanity possible.

Macquarrie and other thinkers emphasise the need for believers to remember that when they speak of the power of God, they are using analogy, and His power is very different from our own. The word ‘power’ refers to power within this world, so when it is applied to God it cannot be applied literally because He is infinitely greater than we are. Following Aquinas, he argues that there will always be aspects of God’s nature that remain unknowable to us – we can understand/express them partially with the use of analogy, but we only have small fallible human minds so they’re difficult to comprehend. Issues with religious language are a key to understanding the attributes of God.

However this raises the question, how can a God who has limited his own power still be omnipotent? Whether it is self imposed or not, it is still limited – His power is not absolute.

A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne

They argued that absolute omnipotence in the sense of total power would not be a perfect quality and that we should think of God as a being whose power cannot be surpassed by any other being rather than as a being with total power.

Hartshorne considers that total power means that nothing else is able to put up any resistance at all to that power, so a totally omnipotent God would have total control over everything, and nothing would be able to do anything unless God allowed it and controlled it.

If I am trying to cut a branch, it will show some resistance so I will have to squeeze the clippers quite hard, but I am stronger than the branch so I can do the clipping. However, if I had total power, it would offer no resistance at all and would be like slicing through melted butter. There is nothing impressive about conquering something that puts up no resistance, like praising someone who came first in a race with no competitors.

Therefore, other beings are able to put up resistance to God but his power is still greater – this is more impressive than a being that nothing can challenge. God’s omnipotence means that God can overcome all resistance, not that God will need no resistance.

#james vardy #swinburne #aquinas #descartes #omnipotence #omnipotence paradox #nature of god #a level revision #a levels #ocr religious studies #ocr rs #religious studies #a level religious studies #philosophy

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jumbo10 · 1 year ago

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What Is The Ontological Argument For The Existence Of God?

The ontological argument is an argument based not on observation of the world (like the cosmological and teleological arguments) but rather from reason alone. Specifically, the ontological argument reasons from the study of being (ontology). The first and most popular form goes back to St. Anselm in the 11th century A.D. He begins with stating that the concept of God is “a being than which no…

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hacvek · 1 year ago

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@wo-chien-fan I did finally come across your initial objection made by other people (Thomists, of all people). Which seemed strange to me to have taken so long to find it, since your initial objection appeared both intuitive and not easily rebutted, while the commonest arguments against the OA are either too philosophically sophisticated for the layman (Kant) or obviously and intuitively wrong (Gaunilo). I was initially playing devil's advocate! Wondering what you make of this supposed rebuttal to the rebuttal (though it does make reference to other parts of the book):

In Thomist circles one often encounters some such formulation as the following: The idea of God, the infinitely perfect being, does include existence, but only ideal, not real, existence. Therefore, it would be a contradiction if I were to think the infinitely perfect being without thinking it as existent, because I would be affirming and denying existence in the same order (Ordnung); however, a contradiction is not present if I attribute ideal existence to the most perfect being, while leaving the question open whether it exists in ontological reality. (Lehmen, Lebrbuch der Philosophie, Freiburg, 1901, BIL, p. 547, quoted in Esser— see Bibliography.) This way of talking makes me wonder how stupid I perhaps am, for I can make no clear sense at all out of what is said. What is ‘ideal existence’? Merely that something is thought to exist? (For a legitimate distinction between conceptual and real existence in terms of the contrast between the that and the how of actualization, see Part One, Sec. 18.) But then a necessity to think infinite perfection as (ideally) existing is the necessity to think that it is thought to be thought to exist—and so on. And besides, the defect with which Anselm’s second Argument (against which Esser quotes the above passage) shows that Greatness cannot be combined is the conceivability of failing to have real existence. A being whose not really existing is conceivable is inferior to one whose not really existing is inconceivable. Therefore it is precisely real existence which must be taken as inseparable from Greatness. What special merit would there be in ideally existing necessarily while really existing contingently? And if one can only think divinity as really existing then atheism is not thinkable, and only a positivist can reject the conclusion of the Argument. Is that what Lehmen and Esser are trying to say? Then let them for pity’s sake say it. For it is painful to be unable to find sense in what must seem sensible to the many who write in this way. When it is suggested, as by Esser (p. 36), that while we must think God as existent, still we may also think that he perhaps does not exist ‘in the real order’, I derive from such formulations only this: we must think divinity as existent, but we may also think the proposition, ‘divinity may not exist’. Once more my intelligence fails to arrive at a coherent meaning. Is it our old friend, ‘God exists necessarily if he exists at all’? This seems implied by Esser (p. 35). As I have argued in various places, this expression also means nothing clear and consistent. If it only means, God either fails to exist or else exists eternally and without dependence upon any other existent, then I think (a) it misuses ‘necessarily’, and (b) it implies a radically unintelligibile form of contingency, ie., that something is but might not have been, yet no cause enabled it to be or furnished its real possibility. To be able not to exist yet to owe one’s existence to no actual condition is a combination of ideas that gives me for one ‘logical seasickness’. In addition I have given many reasons for denying that the ‘nonexistence’ of something is conceivable unless the something is competitive, partly exclusive, in its essential nature, so that another thing could exist in its place. But there is no ‘place’ of God which another thing could occupy instead of Him. I deny that an argument can be refuted by formulations so full of paradoxes as those just considered.

Charles Hartshorne, Anselm's Discovery: A Re-examination of the Ontological Proof for God's Existence Argument, pg. 162-4. The book is free online; the work by Esser he refers to seems to be Matthias Esser, Der ontologische Gottesbeweis und seine Geschichte (1905).

#personal #long post

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wisdomfish · 1 year ago

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Ontological argument of St. Anselm (1033–1109) according to which God’s existence can be deduced merely from the definition of God, such that atheism leads inevitably to self-contradiction. One distinctive of the argument is that it relies on pure reason alone with no dependence on empirical premises. Various versions of the ontological argument have been developed and defended, and opinion is sharply divided even among Christian philosophers over whether there are, or even could be, any sound versions.

#ontological argument #st. anselm #self-contradiction #empirical #philosophy

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writtenexplorations · 1 year ago

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A Theory of Unity

8,535 words

Janine Thomas, born in the year nineteen-forty four, in Luckey, Ohio, was in equal parts determined and grateful. Determined to defeat the stereotype of the country girl eaten up by the system, after just a few days into the new job, that’s for sure. Grateful that Marie Ivson, class nineteen-sixteen, had since taken her under her wing. It had been a tough first week in her new role at Langley.

It was a cold morning of February when agent Sayeb came out of the elevator at the 11th floor and walked straight to the Director’s door, looking like he hadn't slept in a day or two.

"Jenine, when is the Director back from his meeting with the President?"

"This morning at 0900, and we expect him to be at his desk by 0950. I have to warn you Sayeb, no more favors and no more tricks. Do not get me in trouble again. The earliest I can book you in for a meeting is Thursd…"

"I have a code yellow. I need to see him today."

Marie, who had so far pretended to be lost in her typing, looked up from her glasses and said:

"A yellow? This isn't you jumping the queue is it? You know we log these, right?" she said.

"I am serious. Book me in, as early as possible. And get him a coffee. He’ll need a large one for this."

In the 15th century, Anselm the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to prove the existence of God using logic in what went on to be known as "the ontological argument”. It was something like this:

Let’s define God as something the which of, no greater can be thought of. Now, consider that this greatest conceivable being could exist in the mind alone or in the mind and in reality at the same time. Would all agree that to exist in both the real world and the mind is better than to exist in the mind alone? If so, this entity must exist in reality too or else it would not be the greatest conceivable. Therefore: god must exist.

...

"You have five minutes Sayeb, go ahead, brief me."

"Yes Sir:

On December 5th our team in Ankara intercepted orders from the Directorate to locate and approach a certain, uhm, Tarik Özcan, professor of Applied Mathematics at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul. Our operatives on the ground were instructed to monitor the subject, with the double goal to develop an understanding of the KGB’s modus operandi and prepare to track the individual, if the enemy were to successfully recruit him as an asset. We had no prior intelligence on this individual.

On January 18th operatives captured credible intelligence material indicating a plan to kidnap the professor and forcibly move him to an undisclosed location within the Soviet block. As a response, our monitoring was upgraded to be 24/7.

On January 22nd the Directorate's order was changed to target assassination of the highest priority with additional instructions to remove or destroy specific material present in his office. The order was marked Тайфун, which we understand to be a code authorizing destructive, high-profile techniques if needed. Basically a class of targets of such importance that the secrecy of the operation is secondary to its immediate fulfilment."

"Do we know what they were after?"

"We did not, at the time. But the fact they wanted it so badly gone and forgotten, made us want him more. I immediately authorized the extraction and safekeeping of Professor Özcan while we evaluate the situation. He’s en route to Idlewild as we speak."

"So? What was it, do we know now?"

"Yes we do."

"Go ahead dammit, don’t keep me waiting, Sayeb!"

"There is no easy way to say this so I'll go ahead and say just as it is. And Sir, I’m afraid we're going to need more than five minutes."

… of course, any one person with a dose of common sense would make the comment that we are all thinking: logical fallacy.

If I think of something full of good qualities, and existing is a good quality, can I expect the thing I imagined to exist? You think about a wallet stuck with notes in your right back pocket, and, easy as that, become rich for the day . That's pretty much what some contemporaries of Anselm used as a criticism. The first attempt at using logic hadn’t gone very far. But the fascination for its possibility, well, that stuck around for the following millennium.

….

"Let me play back what I think I just heard you say: This guy has mathematically proven that God exists. Beyond doubt. Plain as that. And the Commies are shitting their red pants, because the entire Marxist bullshit doctrine has it that religion is the opium of the masses and a tool of oppression. It turns out: God exists, America is right, and a hundred million angry Russians may soon be storming their palaces and send them to meet Him."

"Oh I wouldn’…"

"This is so fucking grand. Have we had this work validated by our side?"

"Sir, we have, and I believe this is exactly where the question becomes, ehm… interesting.

The calculus was independently verified by Professor Anna Ackermann, from the Technical University of Berlin; she is a serving US intelligence asset of fifteen years. Also by Professor Enrico Freme, of the University of Pisa. He is an American citizen by birth, war veteran, personal friend of General Brooks since 'fifty-eight. And by Professor Abel Wolowitz of Berkeley University, who is not connected to the agencies, but also a decorated war veteran and a patriot.

The work came back clear from all three."

"I love this. Get a team together. Ten more experts. Fly them to one location, no phones, no leave. Have them work separately first, then again together.

I need to be sure this is real before I pass it up the chain of command.

Report back in ten days. Top secrecy. If this links to the press before we have answers, I will have your balls for breakfast. Keep the Professor indoors and happy. Get him whatever fucking food he misses from his homeland, a woman he wants one. Security 24/7 but out of sight, don’t spook him. I want you to come to me with something good. Something usable. This is career-making stuff. Do you understand me?"

…

Thomas Aquinas. Kant. Hume. Many others. Tackling the ontological proof became one of the favourite pastimes of Western philosophers. Some tried to dismantle it, some tried to strengthen it. Criticism ranged from “it only proves the possibility, not the actual existence” to numerous ridiculed, perverted versions, which used the same logic to prove the exact opposite, or to prove true completely ridiculous statements. Politics often got in the way, depending on who-would-gain-what, from finding it right or false. The two warring factions never really managed to get a definite advantage over the other, or draw closer to a final conclusion.

…

Notification card 6789BY

To the attention of: agent Sayeb.

An item is to be collected from the central archive. Proof of identity will be required. Release in person only.

Walking to the interview room, Sayeb felt confident.

The interview brief was extremely thorough. There was a lot to go through, but with questions coming from every possible angle, he was sure to be able to write a good report. The dossier was about fifty pages long. Its contents ordered by colorful labels sticking out from its side.

Red was high priority. Mostly questions submitted from intelligence agencies; Blue and yellow were the academics, mixed backgrounds: philosophy, mathematics, history, theology, biology, physics; White came from the President and close advisors.

Sayeb stopped at the door and allowed a personal thought to come to him. “Am I ready to hear this?”

He opened the dossier at random and gave it a quick glance.

Red. “Has your work been directed/ordered/induced/coerced/instructed or persuaded by any third person or institution, known or unknown to you?”

Red: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: private property is a human right”

Blue: “Is existence a property or an attributed quality of things?”

Yellow: “How did you intuit that Kripke’s semantics could be used to define the accessibility relation as both transitive and non-symmetric, and to subsequently capture the distinctions of the your modal operators?”.

White: “Will the government of the United States and its officials be able to make contact with God before the midterm elections of next year”.

"Had I not been sufficiently clear?” he shouted, storming through the doors.

The Director snapped the dossier off Janine's hands and slammed it on the table, in front of agent Sayeb.

"What is this supposed to be, some kind of practical joke? I asked for two things: make it clear, make it usable. Thirty-eight pages of mathematical gibberish and seventy more of written nonsense. Plus a seventy thousand dollar bill to fly and host experts that couldn’t produce a single line, a single line dammit, that I can use for the intended purposes."

"Sir, matters turned out to be more complicated than we thought…"

"No shit. And your job is to make them simple, so I’ll ask you one more time: is this theory of Mr Tarik true or not? "

"Sir, I believe so, but…"

"Straight answers for God's sake! Yes or no?"

"Then yes, it will be true, meaning it has not been proven false after many rounds of reviews, by several experts.

"And does anyone working on this have any good lead to follow to disprove it?"

"It's a split field, Sir. Those that are the most motivated at disproving it, seem moved by a personal dislike of its conclusions and implications, rather than by issues with the methodology itself."

"And those that agree with it, what level of confidence do they have?"

"High, Sir. Sir, the methodology is unquestioned. My hesitance is related to the reports I received from several experts who say they experienced a, ehm, strong spiritual and emotional turmoil during their work with this material. Most of them seem... changed..."

"Alright; I’ll tell you what I think: this may well be a plot by the Soviets to drive mad our best scientist. They have been working on hypnosis and other shit like that for years. If this is what this is, damn those red devils, and may God help us."

"Sir, nothing indicates that possibility. The only opposition to this theory actually came not from scientists, but from the multi-faith panel of theologists."

"So I heard. Cardinal Dolan has been chewing my ears about this bizarre theory of god-that-is-not-god; why the hell is it so complicated to tell me in plain English. Has he found Him, or not?"

"The mathematical proof is as clear as it can be. It is hard to translate exactly into words how it gets to its conclusion, but I am told there is strong consensus on its validity. Mathematics is like, uhm, a music sheet. It does not translate into words, it is only accessible to those that can read it, if it makes sense."

"Fine but what does it say? What music does he play? A sad music? is it opera? Classical?"

"The theme is one of unity. It shows a way of seeing that all things in the world are interconnected, all parts of one. As far as we can tell this is possibly the biggest achievement of…"

"Oh please. Spare me the hippie bullshit. Where in here does it even speak of the God I pray to, the God of Jesus Christ. The one on the dollar bill?"

"Sir I'm afraid this theory will not answer any of the questions that were passed to us from the Administration. It is not something we can use against the enemy either. It’s more so…"

"So, in short, it's not interesting. Dammit. Bury it and move on.

Waste of fucking time. "

Suddenly, all at once and without warning, there was a strange kind of explosion. With it came, rather surprisingly, no sound at all that I can recall, nor fire, or hurt.

Only then, I realised the explosion did not surround me, but had generated within myself. Upon me came an immense sense of exaltation, a calm kind of joy, without any trace of tension, of wanting, of needing. It was followed by an intellectual understanding that I shall try to describe, knowing too well that such a thing can only be experienced, not conveyed by means of spoken, or written words.

I did not just believe, but I saw that the universe is one living thing. Complexly interconnected and yet, its unity so ostentatiously visible. Between things and beings, I came to see, there exists the same degree of separation there is amongst the drops of the ocean: a never ending exchange of essence, material, forces, and influence with one another. No change in composition, or density, or temperature, or direction of movement is independently determined by this or that particle, but emerges from all of them and affects them all at the same time. Such configuration of reality revealed itself without having never really been hidden, but rather, it was me that was finally able to see it, and to feel part of it. It became apparent, not as a new thought, but as rediscovered knowledge that I already possessed: that all things in this world are subject to the same cosmic order. That the very foundation of existence is co-dependent. That nothing originates from something else, but that all that exists comes from all the rest and has it within it. That all things, for separate we see them, really are one, like phalanges are of the same finger, and fingers are of the same hand, and the two hands are of the same person, who belongs to humanity, who belongs to the world. There would be no dots and drips of ink without the ink, the bottle, and the hand that threw it to the wall. The dots and drips are not because of them, watch it, but the manifestation of them. They are the bottle, the ink, the impact, the hand, the wall.

This principle of interdependence within matter, this order of dependent origination amongst the things that are, I believe, is what many have called with the name of the gods. Not to be intended as the supreme technocrat that all decides and overviews, but as the original order that is in all things.

This vision lasted but a few seconds; its memory and the implication of this experience, have remained with me ever since.

I have finally seen the curve after decades of staring at the individual points of a chart. I have seen the image in the painting after seing for so long nothing but the brush strokes. And what a joyful painting that is. The notion of separateness faded away, and a strong sense of unity has since emerged in me.

It has become pragmatically impossible to think of myself as separate from all of mankind, and all of creation. It seems absurd that I could once hold the notion of my birth as the beginning of me; instead, it is intuitively simple to concept my origin within the cosmic big bang.

How could I deny that what I call me is the result, not only of my choices and circumstances, but of all the choices and circumstances of all the people and all the things that ever existed, in all the places that ever were? How could I deny that the thoughts and actions that I consider “mine” share causes and conditions with the thoughts and the actions of those around me, and those that preceded me? I cannot think that my skin is where I end and the rest begins, since the very flesh of my body is made of the food I ate, the air I breathed, the sun I bathed in. And similarly, that those very things, are between them connected, and share roots in the movements of continents, the cycle of the seasons, the migration of birds, the patterns of weather.

If made we are, by the same, aren’t we really just the manifestation of one thing?

I am the history of this world, I am the weather of the sky. I am the Big Bang and whatever was before it. Everything, every person, every force, nothing else is, but the supreme order playing a part of itself.

Tarik Özcan, Notes to “A Theory of Unity”, published in April, 1974.

"Is that what your parents would say? "

"Oh, that is so unfair to say, Diane!"

"They raised you a good American, it's all I'm saying!"

"They raised me free and respecting of others, and that's what I am teaching my kids!"

"Is that what you think you're doing? because respect is definitely not the word Principal Lewis used this morning!"

"Look, if he doesn't want to recite the pledge it’s his constitutional right to do so! Principal Lewis can take this up with the d…"

"Don't make this a First Amendment thing, you know perfectly well it is not. His books are full of that hand thing. He’s not the same he was a few months ago. You know what's happening and you're pretending it is not!"

"I'm not pretending anything, Diane. This is a new word. You are the one hiding the head under the sand!"

"So this is okay for you?? Your fourteen years old gets suspended for disrespecting the flag, doesn’t stand up when the Principal enters the room…"

"Try and see it from his eyes, it’s hard to respect authority, when the difference between things blurs. I am sure it wasn’t done in disresp…"

"… your five years old comes home crying because she, and I quote her, “feels the hurt of the war in the desert place”.

"Shit, she must have seen the news from the Gulf, I didn't…"

"That’s not the point Eric! For starters, she’s five years old! When I was eight, our boys started coming home from Vietnam and you know what I did? I went to church. Mum and I prayed to God every night for them. We made home bakes and on Sunday morning we raised money for the injured. But their pain wasn't my pain, you understand?"

"I understand that this must be confusing but look, I am not moving them towards this. These ideas are out there. You can’t drive a mile without seeing a hand print. It’s on TV, people talk about it at school. It’s history happening, we cannot call ourselves out of it."

"I just feel so… surrounded… you know… they are pushing us out of this community…"

"Oh. Come here now. Honey, we still live here, and so do Nancy and Tom, Greg, Patrice, the Mitchell’s…"

"The Mitchell’s are with them now."

"I know hon, I know… Let’s give them a call. Invite them for dinner. I mean they just stopped coming to Church but I am sure they are not vampires. Carol used to love your roast. Maybe they can help us understand this thing better."

Ahem… Good morning. Take your seats, please.

…

Thank you.

…

I will now read the Holy Father’s greeting to the congregation in Italian, followed by His address in English, for the benefit of His honoured guests and the international press.

“Do il benvenuto a tutti i fedeli oggi riuniti in preghiera. Nella gioia di Cristo, invoco su noi tutti, l’amore misericordioso di Dio Padre. Il signore vi benedica, in nomine patris, filiae et spiritu santu.”

“Dear Brothers, dear Sisters,

While I cannot be with you in flesh today as I wished, it is with these words that I stand before you in spirit, to address an important matter that has captured the attention of many in our congregation, and the wider world.

New theories posit the existence of an overall order in the universe—a unifying force that some have equated with the divine, the ultimate truth. While we recognize the intellectual integrity and the profound rigour in the work, I wish to emphasise that the Roman Catholic Church and the Christian community approach it with measured scepticism.

Our stance is not at all one of rejection or dismissal, but rather, one that advocates a responsible approach that considers the theological implications and the compatibility with the Holy teachings.

The concept of an overall order in the universe, heralded as a unifying principle, resonates with the fundamental message of interconnectedness that our faith imparts. Indeed, the notion of unity can inspire us to seek common ground, to respect the dignity of all beings, and to work daily towards peace and justice.

However, it is important to clarify that while unity can be embraced, we firmly refuse the notion that "all things are one" in an absolute sense. Our faith teaches us that while there is unity and interdependence within creation, there is also diversity and distinction. Each individual, each being, possesses a unique identity and purpose within the divine plan. The delicate balance between unity and diversity is a reflection of the Lord’s wisdom and His intentions.

The notion of union amongst all things, cannot be reconciled with fundamental principles of the Christian faith such as the uniqueness of the individual, the immortality of the soul, and the distinction between good and evil, between God and the Devil. There is nothing that our loving Father and Satan have in common, for to have something in common, it would have to have originated elsewhere, and there is nothing above God our Lord and creator.

As we have for other scientific discoveries of this century, the Holy Church choses to approach them with humility and prudence, understanding that science, faith and reason are not adversaries but allies in the pursuit of Truth.

We pray to Jesus for His guidance in dialogue, while maintaining our commitment to the teachings and traditions that have guided this community for centuries.

Let us remain open to the wonders of creation and the mysteries of the universe, knowing that our faith can embrace and enrich the understanding of the world, without needing to question the faith itself. May He, at the same time, guide the hearts and the conscience of the scientists to recognise that faith reaches where rationality does not. That we, as the loved subject of the Lord Father, may never fully understand his wisdom.

May the blessings of the Almighty be upon you all. Amen.

Five, four, three, … , …

ON AIR

"Good evening and welcome! This is Jimmy Carmichael. It is 9 p.m in London and you're listening to ‘What’s happening’, a program produced and broadcasted by the BBC for BBC Radio 4.

Tonight we welcome Sir Christopher Hope, long standing political editor for the Daily Telegraph, and professor Justine Liu-Fisher, recently appointed Head of Divinity Studies by the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University.

It's been around for a while now, but it's becoming harder and harder to ignore. From the worrying news of instability coming from abroad, to a looming presence in our very own streets. Is this a passing trend, an emerging a new word order, or an excuse for political unrest? We are talking, of course, about Unity.

Let's hear from our guests. Professor Liu-Fisher, good evening, help us understand. Where does this story begin?"

"Thank you, Jimmy and good evening everyone. We can place the beginning of this story in the early 60s when the basis of today's world scenario was first cast."

"What are those basis, and what is so significant about them now?"

"In the summer of 1961 news began to spread that a proof of the existence of God had been found by Tarik Özcan a Turkish mathematician of Anatolian origin. Or at least, this is what it was called at first, and probably what created much of the attention his work received."

"Are you saying it's not?"

"I am saying the name is controversial to say the least. We need to understand the background in which these claims were made. During his formative years, Turkey had undergone a process of profound modernisation and transitioned to secularism. We cannot underestimate the influence this must have played in the mind of someone coming from a rural and conservative context. Having said that, let me be very clear: the work itself is absolutely sound. It’s been known and discussed for more than thirty years now, and not a single crack has been found."

"Then what is the problem with it?"

"One of the problems, if we want to call it this way, is that mathematics at the level which he used is accessible to very few people outside the academic world. And for those few, there is no discussion to be had. The proof is incontrovertible. The public debate, in a way, centred itself around the meaning and the interpretation of the theory, and is often led by those that have about it, rather than it. Much of that debate emerges from the numerous texts he subsequently wrote, as various appendix to his work. It’s entirely possible that he worried about his work becoming a tool to further undermine the religious traditions or even thought of as a heretic. What we know is that, despite his best intentions of clarifying his stance, his written work created a whole array of misunderstandings and splintered interpretations, on which people from various backgrounds, political, philosophical and religious have since got hung on."

"Sir Christopher Hope, you're shaking your head. Tell our listeners, what doesn't convince you?"

"Well, Jimmy, there is a lot that doesn't. For a start, I have an immediate diffidence for someone that speaks of “unity”, but finds himself at the centre of so much trouble. On one side we have all seen the news coming from East and West. Pakistan, Iran, Yemen are seeing waves of violent protests against the perceived permissiveness for these new ideas by the elites. We have reports from at least fours countries in South America where the same is happening, forcing the hand of local governments to brutal repressions. In Europe, we have seen Italy, Greece, and Israel, taking steps to ban the sales of this text as well as the teaching of its predicament. And France, known to have a strong history of laicism in public life, has recently declared the handprint a religious symbol and forbidden it to be shown in schools and government buildings.

I think the word is recognising this for what it is. And that is an obscure new creed, bringing trouble to any respectable community around the world."

"Professor, let us come back to you about this. You authored a book titled Unity: Religion without prayers. It was published last year by SGL and is about to be reprinted. The title already tells us a lot. Is it a religion then? and if so why is it not preachable?"

"The title is a little play, Jimmy. Many people across the globe can intuitively connect to Unity and are profoundly changed by it. And yet, for the first time, this is a system of belief that doesn't ask us to do anything. No prayer, no struggle, nothing! To answer your question: I don't think Unity was born as a religion, but as a scientific paradigm, that is now taking the form of a religious belief, rather than a religion. By this I mean: It is not organised and hasn’t exhibited any form of proselytism. It spreads naturally, without needing to be preached at all.

Now, if I could very briefly address the comment made by Sir Hope, I would like us to be honest and admit that the trouble and the violence is mostly brought to and not by the followers of the new creed."

"Well, and I say that we should not underestimate the subversive power of these new ideas. The very structure of power which guarantees our safety is at stake. Beliefs that emphasise unity will in time erode the very institutions we know and count on. They are on a collision course with the idea of monarchy, nations, private property, personal freedoms and responsibilities… "

"Professor do you share those worries?"

"I understand where the worries come from, yes, but I don't share them."

"Jimmy, does she meane that none of these things are going to happen, or that she has no problem with undermining the bases of civil society?"

"What I mean is: first of all, the idea of universal unity is not at all as new as you make it. It goes back to very ancient times and is visible throughout the history of western and eastern philosophy. It has been called Brahmā by the Hindus, Logos by the Greek, the Monad by Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, Dao by the Chinese, and of course also in recent times Tawḥīd, in Islam. The basic concept is absolutely not new. What is new, is that now we know it to be true. It’s no longer one of many theories, but a logical reality. This puts it ahead of others interpretations of reality, for sure. This theory is as significant for the history of humanity, maybe more significant actually, than when we first put the Sun at the centre of the solar system. I don't see the point in fighting it. It’s not going back into its box and it can't be ignored. When I say I do not worry, what I mean is that, I am a historian, and as such I recognise that we are at a crossroads, but also that we always have been. Has the world ever not been shaped by something?"

"Welcome back to “What’s Happening”, here in the studio with us: Sir Christopher Hope, political editor at the Telegraph, and Justine Liu Fisher, Professor of Theology and Religion.

Sir Christopher, in the first half we discussed the origin of Unity, and painted its portrait, for what we can. You have been a political editor and foreign correspondent for almost 30 years. Are you worried about what you see? And should we be too?"

"Thanks for the question Jimmy, and the short answer is: I am not panicking, I don't think anyone should, but I am concerned."

"Okay, and that's coming from a man that's covered the height of the Cold War crisis, the youth movements, the defence of the Falklands. What is it that concerns you about this?"

"You see Jimmy, the first element of concern is that movements normally form around something that they very clearly want to achieve. This was true for the the vikings, the puritans, the marxists, the miners, the anti-monarchist, the feminists, and all sorts of fads and extremisms that this country has witnessed in the last twenty centuries. But this? This has no apparent purpose Jimmy, or structure, or spokesperson. It's like watching a crowd forming in front of your house, with no apparent reason. Would you not, at least, be a little uneasy Jimmy?"

"Well yes, I would very much be!"

"And the second reason is that it seems to be escaping most attempts to regulate it or study it. Not in a single country has it been registered as a religion, a political movement, a social group or what have you. Its refusal to be categorised is a suspicious attempt to fly below the radar of civil society and government rules."

"Professor, do you have an opinion? Is it a religion then? A political movement? or is it something that belongs to the classroom and should concern no one outside the purely academic word?"

"To understand this, we ought to remember what the theory of Unity proves: the existence of a higher order in the universe, an interconnectedness of things beyond what we previously imagined. Some call it God, and I can see the appeal to do so, others consider it a significant shift in the understanding of our world, but without much on the side of spirituality. What is undeniable, though, is that the theory has spread incredibly fast outside of the scientific community, even with people that do not have the knowledge to follow the maths and see the proof for themselves. And we are observing spontaneous adherence to behaviours that are surely connected to the new light Unity has shed on the world. If I had to place a bet, I anticipate we may see a major shift in many aspects of life by the time the 2001 census comes around."

"We remind the listeners that in the latest census there was no option to select Unity as a religion, but estimates provided by the Office for National Statistics puts them at around four per cent."

"A wild underestimate, if you ask me, Jimmy."

"What would be your estimate?"

"I’m cautious at guessing, but it definitely feels low, just based on how much the topic is in the public eye, as well as the number of handprinted symbols all around our streets."

"Thanks for mentioning that, it’s actually something I wanted to cover tonight. You are right in saying that the hand symbol is now a common site all around the United Kingdom, and around the world. How does the British public feel about it?"

"How does it feel? Concerned, for sure. There are many in Britain today who feel their traditions have been under attack for years. The very best of British values are being replaced each time a hand poster is put on a shop window, or another of our walls is vandalised with paint."

"That would be understandably upsetting, for sure. Tell us what you mean by being replaced. What values do you feel most at risk?"

"It's our whole way of life really, isn't it? Once enough people believe that there's order to the world, and that we're all made of the same stuff, the very foundation of civil society starts crumbling. The belief that we are meant to bring order into this world is what elevated us from the tree monkeys we once were, taking us from prey of the sabre-toothed tigers to the top of the food chain. The exceptionality of human ingenuity is proven, wouldn’t you agree, by our ability to master the elements, to have left the planet and reached for the stars.

I worry about a belief system that undermines duality, exceptionalism, distinctiveness, excellence, and betterment. Even down to the most practical aspects of modern life. Would we have a parliament with no opposing parties? How do infrastructure, research, defence get funded when the idea of national identity is dissolved into a chaotic -we’re all the same thing- "

"You do sound worried for sure. Do you think the threat is so serious, even with numbers so small?"

"It’s the pace of growth that’s concerning. It’s completely unopposed at the moment, that’s what is really upsetting."

"Do you share these worries Professor? I sense you probably do not?"

"You are right, Jimmy, I do not. First of all we should remind ourselves that the parliament of this country has never been in the business of policing what ideas and beliefs we can adhere to, and it may have a hard time starting with one that’s based on an uncontested scientific basis. But also, we're already seeing scientific progress being made on the back of this shift in paradigm, so I do not worry about progress being slowed. In fields such as medicine, psychology, physics, biology and ecology, more holistic approaches promise to unlock fast and unrelenting progress. I understand the concern of part of the public from a historical point of view. To draw a parallel we probably feel very close to what the late Western Romans felt when Christianity started to take hold in the emp..."

“And rightly so! Look what happened to them!”

"And we are just back after the break. This is “What’s Happening” on BBC Radio4.

During the break our guests continued discussing the symbolism of Unity. Professor Liu-Fisher, you said something fascinating about the meaning of the hand symbol, would you mind repeating that for our audience?"

"For sure. I said that it’s somewhat ironic that a clearly human-centric symbol has become the most recognised for a theory that predicates the exact opposite"

"Indeed ironic, and maybe... baffling. How did it come to be this way? It’s one of the metaphors used by Tarik Özcan, isn’t it?"

"It is, but he used so many. Any of those could have become popular. We can’t deny that it is very simple, anyone can make it by just touching some wet paint and then a surface. There is surely a powerful symbolism also in the fact that each hand is inevitably different and unique from another one, but at the same time, when it represents Unity, it loses its uniqueness, to assume a universal meaning, to become part of the same concept as all the other hands. In the same way, its component parts, the phalanxes, the palm, the fingertips, are separated by visible lines, and yet we never fail to recognise it as a hand. We would never mistake it for a collection of fingers.

Last, I think there is an ancestral appeal to it too, it’s the earliest way humans have used to say I am here. I find it poetic that the very first symbol of humans distinguishing themselves from others, and from nature, returns to be the symbol of our reconciliation to it all."

“But, Professor, allow me a pointy question, for the benefit of those that are not persuaded by the new creed, or the science it’s based on: as long as you talk about an invisible order, a sense of connection, I think most common folks are happy to follow along. But much of the talk around Unity goes as far as denying the separateness of things. How are we supposed to believe something that’s so clear to our every day experience of life?

Am I not me, instead of you? Am I, very clearly, not a dog, a plastic toy, a seashell, a cloud, a fistful of sand?”

“Of course Jimmy. And for everyone who’s listening too, let me make this clear, Unity doesn’t deny individuality, at all!

You are undeniably yourself, and not someone else. Undeniably a human man, and not many other things.

But the question is, while being your own thing, can you deny being made of the same material, or subject to the same processes as…”

“Excuse the interruption, but this is a crucial point for me: so are we talking about levels of separateness? Looked at ,from far enough two people or two things, become indistinguishable, and all that?”

“Not quite, no. Unity works just as well at a micro level. Let me tell you: there is no difference whatsoever between the atoms of iron and copper in your bloodstream and those that make the wires of every recording equipment in this studio. Between the silica particles in your brain and those in the fistful of sand you mentioned. There is no doubt that the water in you at this very moment was once in a cloud, a raindrop, a river, inside animals and people, millions of times before being in you.

And so, while it’s possible to see what is you, it’s not possible to see it without everything else too.

Think of it this way: Unity denies the separateness between things. It denies that they are disjointed, while recognising that they are distinct.

I understand this might be complicated, or frightening, but the good news is, the world is already working this way, there is no threat of losing yourself by simply accepting to see it!”

"Thanks for picking me up, Sis"

"It's all good. I needed a break. I've been stuck for days again. How is Manny anyways? What have you two been up to?"

"Oh, not much, you know. We're meeting a couple of times per week to work on the motorbikes Uncle Ben gave us."

"His old bikes? "

"Yeah, he was going to give them away as scrap and Manny told him we’d make it a summer project to fix them."

"By the way, I'm taking the 65, because the 32 was stuck to a standstill on the way here. You cool with that?"

"Makes no difference to me! They talked about it on the radio but I didn't catch why. Demonstration again?"

"Nah, just regular 6pm traffic this time. Hopefully, they're not all moving to 65 now. Anyways, sorry, I stopped you. The bikes…"

"No worries. That's it really. Basically, one bike is a perfect outer shell, missing a few things on the inside, while the other one can run, but it's not allowed on the road without light, brakes, new tires…"

"So you're making one bike out of two?"

"Pretty much."

"Cool of you to give him your bike to fix his one."

"We’re not really thinking about it like that. We have two bikes, we’ll make one. That’s as far as we thought of it."

"Ah. Shoot, look at the traffic on the interstate, we’ll get bogged down on the first junction, I bet you five bucks."

"Yep, we’re quickly going from looking at the traffic to being the traffic. I've got cookies, do you want some while we wait?"

"Cookies?"

"Auntie made them. Manny wouldn’t touch them because he says the price to get one is you have to listen to her tell you there is no cookie without the water, the egg, the flour, and the heat of the oven. And there is no water without rain, eggs without chicken, flour without wheat. And so the cookie really is a small part of everything, and everything is in it…"

"Ouch. Heavy cookies."

"I don’t mind, to be honest. I like Auntie and her stories. Plus, I got cookies. You okay Sis?"

"Yeah ok. Just reflecting on the traffic thing you said. And this. And here we go. We're crawling. We have become the traffic."

“You got to be back already?"

"Not really. I wasn't any less stuck working on my thesis than I am here, really."

"Manny asked me what is your PhD thesis about but I couldn't really explain it to him. I mean, I said physics you know, but that's all I had. some new, advanced, badass physics, is what I told him."

"It's actually a fairly old problem I’m trying to solve. Scientists have being at it for, like, seven or eight decades: some think light is a wave others think it's a particle.

“Eight decades! and still no winners??”

“Probably means they are both right."

"Can they? be both right?"

"So far, each part has devised experiments that prove their theory but without disproving the other. Trouble is: we cannot find a way to explain how they can both be right."

"No wonder you're stuck. How about we come out of 65 at the next exit, get a burger and wait the traffic out?"

"Okay four miles to the next exit though. At this pace, that's a fifty-five minute wait for those burgers. Jay, about the bike thing. How did you and Manny decide who’s bike is it going to be?"

"What? Why?"

"I'm just thinking, I don't know much about bikes, so maybe this is a stupid question, but what's the important part?"

"How do you mean? All of them of course. An engine wouldn’t do much without wheels, and vice versa."

"Yeah no, okay. What I mean is: say for example you take the engine and the wheels off a bike and you sell them, replace them with new ones. You wouldn't say you have a new bike. After all, it's still your bike, just with new things on. Then you take, I don't know the lights, the tank, and more parts until you change every single one, every screw even, then you would say it is not the same bike, I suppose? So what is it? Which one is the part that identifies the whole thing. The limit between being the same and being something else? Is that a particular component? A certain percentage of the whole thing?"

"Uhm, I don't know. It’s a bit useless to think about it this way to be honest, why would you need to identify that part anyways?"

"Okay then let me try and rephrase it. I had the feeling I was onto something but it escaped me. So Uncle had two bikes. He gave one to you and one to Manny. They are two separate entities. Neither of them works fully. You start swapping and replacing parts until you have, theoretically, two bikes in working order. How do you know which one is yours, if you’ve been swapping stuff. What is the essential component that identifies it as not the other one”.

"I don't know, the plate?"

"Oh come on. You mean that if you swap plates, you will start considering Manny’s bike as yours? No, come on, that’s not the core part of its identity, is it?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think there is a particular component. Is it the sum of them all... I think you have this wrong Sis, a motorbike is not one important bit and everything else just allows it to run. What you call a bike is the collective of all the parts, but also the interplay of all of its components. It’s how it feels, how it vibrates, how it sounds; you define it by all of its components and all of its behaviours at once, not by choosing one over the other."

"Say that again."

"Which part? It's how they work together? that? Why that smile? is it too crazy to say?"

"Oh, no. Not at all. In fact, nothing seems to be too crazy in quantum physics! I think you gave me the key to something little brother. Burgers 're on me!"

Jean-Marc Nguyen, born in the year two thousand fifty-four, in Seoul, Hanmin, was in equal parts determined and grateful. Determined to make the most of his fourth year at University. The foundational years had been tough, as they were supposed to be, for a course that had to cover the fundamentals of so many subjects and parts of knowledge. Grateful because he found every day as interesting as the first.

So many things had to happen in the right way, at the right time, for him to even be here. A free University course, in a unified peninsula, open to students from around the world. A process of many years in the making, involving millions of people connecting their stories to shape the present. It would have looked impossible to anyone in his grandparents' generation, and yet, here it was. Universities courses back then were strictly regulated, siloed, disconnected, and normally only three to five years long. Strange, also, was to think that people would be content to study one particular field and considered to have mastered it, in isolation from all the rest of knowldge.

It suited well to have picked only two courses in the first two years. That was Mathematics, of course, and Epistemology. At the end of the second year he had been able to read The Theory and see, something that the majority of students would take four, five, sometimes ten years to do. Not that they wasted any time, as knowledge can be approached from any side of course… but things were undeniably easier now. There is no mystery to writing music once one can see it as geometry; architecture was the natural consequence of biology and arts, well all arts are intimately intertwined with history, economic theory and psychology. All fields of knowledge are but colours on the same painting once one has learned to see.

It was a cold morning of February when the Professor, still dusting a few snowflakes off her coat, delighted the students by beginning the lesson as if mid-sentence, exactly where she left it at the break of the year:

“... a final conclusion that, as you know, takes us all the way to the twentieth century.

In the coming weeks, we'll explore and discuss the recordings of the early lessons by Alan Hoffman, to celebrate the just passed fiftieth anniversary of the first-ever course of studies in Applied Unity.

Hoffman, who was never a very spiritual man, taught Theory of Knowledge at a private college in Houston, Texas. Upon joining a local teachers association, he met and formed a long-term relationship with biologist Dr. Mary Anne Lewis. The relationship fostered his earlier interest in the field of entomology. When Dr. Lewis was appointed Visiting Fellow at Columbia University, he submitted a voluntary application to assist the Faculty of Biology, where he spent the following two decades, with various degrees of success.

We need to bear in mind that at the time, Unity was certainly well known, although still overcoming varying degrees of ostracism in public life and academic circles.

Hoffman’s most important contribution came to the spotlight during the team’s research on the social structure of insect colonies. Having observed the incredible breakthroughs in quantum physics during the first decade of the century, he was one of the first to apply Unity to non-mathematical scientific endeavours. He suggested and then helped formulate our current understanding of species such as bees and ants. For the first time, scientists stopped considering individuals bees and ants as the unit of their species, which may sound silly to say today, but came to see the Hive and the Farm as the living organism, and the individual insects as their manifested body. Nowadays, any five-year-old will tell you it is the Hive that is alive and the bees all have roles to play, similar to what the organs and the cells have in the human body, likewise, similar to what each human represents to life on Earth.

These views opened the doors not only to the development of our understanding of insect colonies but the questioning of many other established fields. Hoffman subsequently became an advocate of Unity for research across the spectrum of all knowledge.

His work is, to this day, seen as fundamental to the theories of Hinkels and Bjorn, which you know to be at the very base of much of the world we live in today. Without further ado, this is an extract from his lecture, on June 6th, 2011:”

“...

Dr. Tarik’s work became a new lens, through which we could understand the old ways of thinking.

How peculiar, isn’t it, it that the human species forgot what is probably one of the most obvious things in this world. For several millennia we believed in a blatant contradiction to the facts of nature and we never even tried to question our assumptions! At some point in our shared history, it became convenient for us to develop a new identity: of being somebody who comes into this world, rather than out of it. As if there were somewhere else to come from.

Let's take a walk around history. We begin this story with the ape-human. Perfectly integrated into nature, it didn't think itself any different from the monkeys, the birds and all other things. For millions of years. When their numbers allowed it, the ape-human found it safer to organise itselves in groups, small or big, depending on the resources available. Vaguely reminiscing the cosmic order we are part of but unable to put it fully in focus, we invented the gods. The tribes-man and tribes-women were born and quickly found themselves dealing with a multitude of conflicting interests: individuality, family, tribe; life outside the encampment and inside it; the laws of Man and the laws of Nature.

The ancient civilised world was, ironically, a world of even more staggering violence and uncertainty than the natural world, a fact that pushed humans to huddle even closer in their tribes. And how would such men and women relate to any divinity? In a world where submission and domination were commonly the only two ways to survive, we developed an idea of humanity submitted and dominated by the gods. How else could it have been?

It's not at all surprising that the idea of the Divine came to them first as a multitude of conflicting deities. The polytheistic pantheon is full of gods and semi-gods, requiring humans to balance carefully between their needs and their own, often tricking them or rewarding them unexpectedly.

This took many forms across the world, but in its purest form, lasted for ten to fifteen thousand years. Tribes tried to reconcile the tensions by organising themselves in even bigger groups, around a single figure with seemingly infinite power compared to the rest of them. And so, while the age of Kings and Emperors came, so started the shift to the idea of one God, the origin of all, responsible for the good and the bad, one that is both loving and terribly frightening.

This was, no doubt, an improvement on the state of chaos and uncertainty of the warring pantheon of divinities. But hardly made the world a happier place for the civilised-human!

For centuries, the political and the mystical supported one another in cementing the perception of a world ordered in tiers: the God (and the King it chose) in the top tier, and all its creations at the bottom, with the exception of man sitting squarely in the middle. Better than the rest, for being the only creation that is able to acknowledge and cherish its creator. But not good enough to sit next to it, bound to its mortal means and limits, attempting to scale up the ladder of creation in countless myths and legends. This position only intensified humanity's the efforts to distance itself from nature by mastering it, by bending it to its will.

..." You know now, the next step closes the circle.

Modern-humans came to find themselves in a world where their biggest threat came not from nature, but from the extreme consequences of living a segregated life from it. The mid-2020s were the perfect field for a systemic solution to spread like wildfire. The concept of Unity, was ready to become extremely attractive, aided by the tremendous scientific discoveries made through the new paradigm.

But of course, you will already be thinking, this is not the whole story. For the history of Man cannot be told apart from the history of all other things, no less that the history of any person can be without the history of their family, the history of the country, and of others.

We will shortly begin focusing on these connections, and by doing so we will be building the bridge to the next phase of human history.

Which seems to have, at last, after a long walk around, brought us right where we were in the beginning.

#sci-fi #science fiction #creative writing #short story

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